Mori Group • Genome Diversity Laboratory::National Institute of Genetics

Mori Group • Genome Diversity Laboratory

Genome biology to understand the organismal diversity in environments

Faculty

MORI, Hiroshi

Associate Professor

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Research Summary

Organisms inhabit various environments and exhibit remarkable genomic diversity. Our main research goal is to understand the relationships between genome diversity and habitat diversity. We use various bioinformatics and statistical methodologies related to comparative genomics and metagenomics in our research. Our research is related to ancient DNA analysis of extinct animals, and genome reconstruction of phylogenetically novel bacteria from metagenomic sequencing data. We are also developing some bioinformatics methods and tools for genomics and metagenomics, and applying these methods to various collaborative research in the Advanced Genomics Center.

(A) A VITCOMIC2 visualization example of microbiome sequencing data. VITCOMIC2 is a phylogenetic composition inference web service for microbiome sequencing data. Each dot represents a microbial taxon that exists in a microbiome sample. The distance between the dot and the outer circle indicates the DNA sequence difference between the taxon and the reference 16S rRNA gene sequence. The reference taxa are ordered on the outer circle based on the average phylogenetic distance between them.
(B) The inferred history of the origin of the Japanese wolf. Our ancient DNA study of Pleistocene wolf remains recovered in Japan reveals that the origin of Japanese wolf is a hybrid of two morphologically distinct wolf lineages.

Selected Publications

Mori H, Maruyama T, Yano M, Yamada T, Kurokawa K. VITCOMIC2: visualization tool for the phylogenetic composition of microbial communities based on 16S rRNA gene amplicons and metagenomic shotgun sequencing. BMC Syst Biol. 2018 Mar 19;12(Suppl 2):30.

Mori H, Ishikawa H, Higashi K, Kato Y, Ebisuzaki T, Kurokawa K. PZLAST: an ultrafast amino acid sequence similarity search server against public metagenomes. Bioinformatics. 2021 Jul 7;37(21):3944–6.

Segawa T, Yonezawa T, Mori H, Akiyoshi A, Allentoft ME, Kohno A, Tokanai F, Willerslev E, Kohno N, Nishihara H. Ancient DNA reveals multiple origins and migration waves of extinct Japanese brown bear lineages. R Soc Open Sci. 2021 Aug 4;8(8):210518.

Segawa T, Yonezawa T, Mori H, Kohno A, Kudo Y, Akiyoshi A, Wu J, Tokanai F, Sakamoto M, Kohno N, Nishihara H. Paleogenomics reveals independent and hybrid origins of two morphologically distinct wolf lineages endemic to Japan. Curr Biol. 2022 Jun 6;32(11):2494-2504.e5.